


Love Letter To My Waitress

by backtoblack101



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Restaurant, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2015-05-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 15:32:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3983371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backtoblack101/pseuds/backtoblack101
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you ever just fuck up so badly you realize there’s no possible way you can fix the situation, so instead you just have to take a step back and admire how monumental the fuck up was?”</p><p>A story in which Angie really isn't the best waitress in the world in spite of her best efforts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Letter To My Waitress

**Author's Note:**

> From the tumblr prompt ‘You’re a famous critique and I’m a server and I get so nervous that I trip and spill the dish all over you’ AU.

“She’s here! She’s here!” The frantic whisper spread round the kitchen like an oil fire and Angie couldn’t help but be drawn into the commotion even though she hadn’t a clue what was going on.

She’d only been waitressing in The L&L Bistro for a week and she hadn’t quite gotten into the swing of how things worked just yet. So she let the hustle and bustle go on around her for another minute before finally having enough of the vagueness.

“Hey, wanna clue a gal in on what’s happenin’?” She nudged Gloria, the floor manager, who was standing next to her.

For a moment Gloria looked shocked, though she leaned in anyways to explain. “Peggy Carter’s eating here tonight and she just pulled up outside.”

“Peggy Carter?” The name meant nothing to Angie, though then again any name that didn’t have a direct link to the theatre usually meant nothing to her.

Now Gloria really did look flabbergasted though. “ _The_ Peggy Carter…” She repeated, sighing dramatically when Angie’s expression remained blank. “Restaurant critic for the New York Time? The one person in New York that can make or break a chef’s career?”

“Oh,” Angie nodded dumbly. “Sounds important…”

Gloria grabbed her wrist then, dragging her around the edge of the kitchen to the viewing window that looked out onto the restaurant floor – a little on the quiet side even for a Tuesday night.

“See her...” Gloria pointed to a table by the window though Angie didn’t instantly see the occupant as their in house wine connoisseur, Ben, was taking her drink order.

When Ben finally did move Angie almost fell back against the bain-marie in shock. When Gloria had said restaurant critic Angie’s brain – which was desperately undereducated in culinary culture – had automatically conjured up the image of a stuffy elderly woman with too much make-up that didn’t quite hide her deep set wrinkles and who wore large fur jackets to mask what years of lavish dining had done to her figure.

Peggy Carter was none of those things.

Granted her outfit was in keeping with the tone of the restaurant, and therefore a little pricy for Angie’s taste – well more for her budget really, but she could at least pretend it was her own personal style that kept her away from thousand dollar dresses. It was still eloquent though; a flowing crimson dress that hugged her in all the right places and stopped at her knee to reveal exquisitely toned legs that could quite possibly have gone on for days. Angie didn’t stay staring at her legs for long though because if there was one thing more eye catching than them, it was Peggy Carter’s face.

Like wow, she had a great face.

Her chestnut curls framed her high, sharp cheek bones and strong jaw perfectly and Angie imagined the very real possibility of ending up with a paper cut if you touched her at all. Then there were her lips. As red as her dress and as full as her breast – not that Angie had dared ogle her in that way.

“I’m not serving her… right?” Angie croaked after what she was sure was far too long a pause.

Gloria smirked. “Even if you weren’t new on the job, after the way you just drooled I wouldn’t let you within ten feet of her.”

“Yea…” Angie nodded slowly, chancing one more glance out at Peggy. “Yea I think that’s for the best.”

“You just look after tables one to seven, let me look after our VIP.”

-.-.-.-

Tables one to seven were a synch. This may have been Angie’s first week on the job but it wasn’t her first time waitressing and she tended to find that whether it be a lowly café on the brink of closure, or one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan the key to a customer’s heart was chit-chat. And boy did she know how to chit-chat.

The important thing was to gauge your audience before hand – something she’d learned from an improve class she took in college – and know whether they’d engage you or whether you had to engage them. In places like this it was mostly Angie that needed to do the engaging, and the perfect time to do so was while she took the order. Commenting on the food they were choosing and making promises of how it would melt in their mouth was how Angie found her in and after that it was all a matter of listening to them prattle on about themselves while she daydreamed about the tip they’d be leaving.

Not that she didn’t love listening to peoples stories; there’d been a German couple in just the day before that had told her about how they’d met while hitchhiking in Australia and found out they’d lived just two streets away from one another when they’d been kids. Then they’d explained to her that they’d decided to travel the world together rather than spend money on a wedding and a mortgage and that’s how they’d ended up in New York. Unfortunately not all Angie’s customers had such colourful lives though, and more often than not she found herself nodding along to middle-aged men that presumed everyone was just as interested in the stock market as they were.

That’s what was happening to her right now at table four as well. She’d taken their order almost five minutes ago and she was still standing there, being told about what shares she should consider investing in if she didn’t want to end up in a dead end job the rest of her life. She’d promised him she’d take his advice, though that hadn’t shut him up and now he was ranting about the way immigrants were leaching off the economy and Angie didn’t quite have the heart to tell him America was a nation of immigrants so instead she stared off into space and let him rant, her eyes almost instantly landing on Peggy Carter.

She was just finishing her starter, the last forkful of smoked trout with watercress purée and chopped egg salad (yes that was the full title of the dish and no, just saying “smoked trout” wasn’t concise enough apparently) slipping past her blemish free lipstick in a way that Angie really shouldn’t find sensual but oh boy did she. The way her jaw rotated slowly as she chewed as well left Angie imagining how her jaw would move doing other things and – oh god she’d need to say an extra Hail Mary tonight before bed.

Before she had a chance to continue this train of thought, that would no doubt have her mother weeping for her salvation if only she knew, she caught Gloria motioning for her out of the corner of her eye. Mr. I’m Probably No More Than A Second Generation Immigrant But I’m Still Going To Bad Mouth Immigrants was still droning on though and so all Angie could do was discretely motion down to him then shrug, letting Gloria know that for now she was, for better or worse, occupied.

In all it was a further two minutes before Angie managed to escape by which point Gloria had lifted Peggy’s starter, leaving the critic sitting patiently waiting on her main course.

Not that Angie had been staring or anything.

Except she had, and Peggy had noticed as well because once her starter had been lifted she’d taken the opportunity to glance around the restaurant and her eyes had instantly landed on Angie. Of course Angie had at least had the good sense to blush and quickly look away, though she supposed having wait staff stare at you was the type of thing famous restaurant critics were used to, because when she’d look back up a few seconds later Peggy was still staring, a look somewhat akin to amusement playing across her face.

“That guy give you his life story?” Gloria huffed, coming up next to Angie as she entered his order into the till so it would show up in the kitchen.

“No, though he did give me all his wonderful and thought provoking arguments as to why traditional American society is crumbling.” Angie finished keying in the order and barely contained an eye roll as she turned to Gloria. “What was it you wanted anyway?”

“I need to pee,” she explained in a bit of a rush. “And Daniel has a stain on his shirt so chef isn’t allowing him to serve Carter’s table.”

“Wait…” Angie’s eyes went wide. “I thought you said you didn’t trust me?”

“Don’t get so twisted up,” Gloria insisted. “I’m going for a quick pee break, I’ll be no more than a minute and her main course shouldn’t be ready before then so all you’re gonna be doing is watching her to make sure she doesn’t start choking on the air around her or something equally unlikely.”

Angie knew Gloria was being patronizing now, though it didn’t help. “And what if that does happen?”

“I don’t have time for your ridiculous hypotheticals.” Gloria rolled her eyes. “The sooner I pee the sooner you can go back to your lecture on modern American society so just…” she gave her a hard look. “Don’t fuck up.”

Then she was gone, leaving Angie feeling even more nervous than when she first thought she might have to interact with the drop dead gorgeous brunette at the beginning of the night. “Don’t fuck up…” she huffed under her breath. “Fat loada good that’ll do me if she does start to choke.”

Still it wasn’t a bad way to spend a couple of minutes. Usually standing idly behind the counter staring at pretty customers would get her shouted at though right now she was working, and boy, a minimum wage job that barely paid her rent had never been such a good thing.

That said, when Angie had been twelve her parents had bought her a doll for her birthday, with long blonde hair Angie could braid and three different outfits depending on whether her doll was at the beach, on a date, or going shopping with her friends. That doll, Chloe had been her name, had only lasted an hour before her older brother Marco had come along and snapped her head off thus teaching Angie that all good things must come to an end and now, as the bell rang in the kitchen indicating there was an order ready, she was cruelly reminded of that fact.

The bell was too quick to mean the order was for her guy at table four, and aside from him and Peggy everyone else was already eating and so when Angie pushed herself off the counter she’d been leaning against she could already feel her palms getting sweaty at the thought of having to deliver the food.

“This is for Ms Carter?” Chef Thompson barked once he saw Angie’s reluctant form shuffle towards the dish on the counter. “Where’s Gloria?”

Angie glanced towards the staff bathroom at the back of the kitchen, seeing the door still closed. “Bathroom…” She replied awkwardly, having never liked Chef Thompson’s harsh temperament. “She should be out in just a tick though so…”

“You think my dish can wait _a tick_?” Chef Thompson snapped back, pushing it towards Angie on the counter. “It’s hot now, so you need to go with it now.”

“Right…” Angie nodded dumbly. “Yea of course, right…” She picked up the dish. “What uh-“

“It’s a roast duck breast with fondant potato, salt baked celeriac, roast long beets and kale,” Chef Thompson told her, his look unwaveringly severe the entire time. “Don’t you dare forget any of that.”

Angie just nodded and, with the plate in hand, turned on her heel and left the kitchen making a hesitant bee line towards Peggy Carter’s table. She was sure she’d be fine. She’d delivered food to pretty people before. This was no big deal; Peggy was just another pretty person. Granted, she was a pretty person that also happened to be _extremely_ important in determining the fate of the restaurant but Angie didn’t let that get to her. It wasn’t like – oh wow wait, no one told her she was prettier up close.

She’d spotted Angie approaching and her lips had curled upwards in a devastating smile and Angie was pretty sure she was already shaking like a leaf but then of course she’d gone and really snookered herself because wow – like wow – she should not have made eye contact. Not when she was close enough to see the chocolate brown of her eyes and the long, dark curl of her lashes and the way fine lines appeared around the inner corner of her eyes when she smiled.

Yea eye contact was an awful idea.

Eye contact was awful and now things were even more awful because Angie was stopped right in front of her, the plate of roast whatever still in her hands and she could feel her palms begin to sweat even more between the combined heat from the plate and just the general way her body seemed to be shutting down. She so desperately wanted to drop the food and run out into the alley behind the restaurant to bash her head off the wall for a few minutes but that wasn’t _really_ an option right now and so instead she tried her best to remember what the hell Chef Thompson had called this dish as she leaned down to place it in front of Peggy.

“Now ma’am, your roast duck breast wi-“ The sentence hadn’t even left her mouth when everything went tits-up.

Her palms had been far sweatier than even she’d realised and the plate had slipped from between her fumbling fingers before it had hit the white linen table cloth, crashing straight into Peggy Carter’s beautiful red dress and landing (upside down of course) on her lap.

And Angie just stared. Even when Peggy recoiled in her seat and swore under her breath (and oh god it was a British accent, as if Angie wasn’t doe-eyed enough as it was) Angie just stared in abject horror at the fondant potatoes rolling off Peggy’s lap and onto the floor and the obnoxious breast of roast duck creating a stain on her dress and the leafs of kale decorating the mess in a way that was almost artistic.

“You’re just staring…” Peggy noted after a moment, having had no option but to pick the duck off her own lap and place it on her side plate.

“Sorry!” Angie suddenly snapped to, making a move to reach into Peggy’s lap to help her with the kale and beets before thinking better of it. “I just…” In the distance she vaguely recognised the sound of Chef Thompson screaming in the kitchen. “Do you ever just fuck up so badly you realise there’s no possible way you can fix the situation, so instead you just have to take a step back and admire how monumental the fuck up was?”

For a moment Peggy stopped picking kale off her dress and looked up to offer Angie a sympathetic smile. “A few years ago I was helping a friend move his new flat screen TV into his living room and I sneezed.” She frowned slightly. “Needless to say I’m now no longer allowed to help him move things.”

“Bet that didn’t cost you your job though,” Angie sighed, crouching down to pick some of the potatoes off the floor rather than stare any longer at Peggy, who really should be mad but instead was just maddeningly understanding.

“You really think they’ll fire you?” She sounded sympathetic so Angie didn’t look up right away – lord knows she didn’t need to see that face scrunched with concern.

“I’ve only been here a week,” Angie explained, finally standing with two hands full of potatoes to deposit on the table.

“Oh…” Peggy winced. “In that case I’d probably fire you too if it were my restaurant...” She paused then for a second, seeming to have realised what she said. “No offence.”

“I just threw a meal on you…” Angie laughed. “I’m in no position to take offence.”

Peggy opened her mouth to reply but it was just then Gloria seemed to make a re-appearance from her bathroom break – talk about too little too fuckin’ late.

“Angie what the hell?” She hissed, almost causing Angie to jump clean out of her skin before turning to Peggy. “Ms Carter I am so, so terribly sorry.” She turned back to Angie then. “Chef wants to speak with you… now.”

-.-.-.-

Angie was job hunting (surprise, surprise) when she stumbled across Peggy Carter’s review of the L&L. Apparently the job listings were just a page over from culinary section, who knew.

She skimmed most of it. Apparently the atmosphere was great and so was the décor, the starter left her craving more, and the wine she’d been given was a little dry for her taste. Not that Angie cared about any of that. What she was after was towards the end of the review – which was, Angie noted, considerably shorter than the other two reviews on the page.

_The main course, roast duck breast with fondant potato, salt baked celeriac, roast long beets and kale looked simply divine… from what I saw of it anyway. Truth be told it didn’t make it all the way to the table because unfortunately even in the most professionally run establishment mistakes can happen._

Angie scoffed at that part – try telling Chef Thompson that.

_For some reason though the roast duck in my lap and the potatoes rolling about on the floor didn’t faze me as much as one would think and that was probably a lot to do with the young woman serving me, whose eyes went wide in horror and whose response to the incident left me with a smile on my face rather than a frown. And now, considering I’ve nothing else left to say about the food, I’ll spend the final part of this review telling you why it is staff such as this young woman that are so vital to a restaurant’s survival, perhaps even more so than the food._

_Good staff are often hard to come by, and friendly staff even more so. Though while bad staff can be trained to be good, unfriendly staff can never be trained to brighten a customer’s day and it is this key factor that is overlooked by too many restauranteurs in my humble opinion. You see, while good staff can lay the perfect table and recommend the best bottle of wine it is only friendly staff that poses the unique capability to keep the customer smiling when the food comes out cold or, as was my experience, when the food ends up in your lap. So maybe next time you’re hiring staff bear in mind that anyone can be trained to lay a table, though it is only a unique few that poses what it really takes to become a waitress._

_Oh, and on a not entirely relevant note, to the waitress that did serve me my dinner in my lap (that is if you ever read this) I left my number with your co-worker, Gloria, so perhaps call me sometime and we can go for dinner somewhere that you’re not serving the food._

**Author's Note:**

> I hope my boss reads this someday and realizes that I MAY NOT BE THE PERFECT WAITRESS BUT AT LEAST I'M FRIENDLY DAMMIT (okay so maybe I locked up last week without taking in the sign from the street but w/e I'm only human)


End file.
